Then Grimes took the podium, electrifying the crowd in a 36-minute speech with a succession of zingers at McConnell and populist-tinged proposals, such as raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and easing regulations on coal production. She didn’t say how much the agenda would cost.

“Faced with hardship, it is Sen. McConnell who has failed Kentucky,” she said, blaming the Republican leader for rising unemployment and disappearing coal mining jobs in the state. About 600 people with tickets — including a parade of Democratic state politicians — braved frigid temperatures to hear Grimes speak in Floyd County, an area that has never voted for McConnell in his five previous Senate general election campaigns.

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“Mitch McConnell is having the biggest scare of his life,” former Democratic Gov. Julian Carroll said after Grimes’s speech. But he added Grimes’s biggest risk would be if she’s “unable to shed the influence of the negativity of Obama in Kentucky.”

A play-it-safe strategy

Indeed, Grimes has tried to shed any association with the unpopular president — so much so that she often avoids addressing questions about his major policies.

In an interview that the campaign limited to less than nine minutes, Grimes declined three times to say whether she opposes new federal emission regulations on coal-fired power plants, instead raising more general concerns about burdensome restrictions on Kentucky’s coal sector. She wouldn’t explicitly say whether she opposes cap-and-trade legislation to control global warming, saying instead there are “too many regulations” on businesses. [A spokeswoman later said that Grimes does, in fact, oppose cap-and-trade.]

Grimes’s supporters call her tactics not unlike McConnell’s fierce message discipline. It’s hardly uncommon, they say, for a new candidate who has been mainly engaged in state and local issues to take time to formulate positions on federal matters. They say her circumspect responses are rooted in her deliberate nature, a style she developed from her legal training. She practiced intellectual property and business litigation law before running for Secretary of State.

In the interview, Grimes wouldn’t say whether she’d back oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (when pressed, she said she’d “consider” it). She brushed aside a question about raising taxes for families who earn more than $250,000 — saying only that the budget shouldn’t be balanced on the “backs of hard-working Kentuckians” and attacking McConnell for “looking out for the top 1 percent.”

Fleeing from Obama

Despite its reputation as a conservative state, Democrats have long dominated Kentucky elections: There are about 1.7 million registered Democrats in the state and 1.2 million Republicans. But those figures mask how disliked national Democrats are. Obama is a vilified figure here: He won just four out of 120 counties in his reelection bid. Voters are frustrated by the stubbornly poor economy and a range of left-leaning policies out of Washington, from Obamacare to regulations affecting coal country in Eastern and Western Kentucky.

That presents a vexing problem for Grimes.

Asked whether she’d vote for the president again if she had a chance to do it over, Grimes said “your facts are mistaken there” and wouldn’t go further. A spokeswoman later said Grimes had been a Hillary Clinton delegate at the 2008 Democratic Convention, though she was a member of the Kentucky delegation to the convention four years later and said publicly at the time that she backed the president’s reelection bid.

“In terms of this race, I speak for myself, I’ve been an independent thinker, I will continue to do that,” she said. “Sen. McConnell had his chance to run against the president many years ago. He chose not to do that. I think what you’re seeing here, is a very old play from a very old playbook. It just shows what little record Sen. McConnell actually has to run on.”

Family politics

What has surprised political types in Kentucky is how the party has so far remained united behind Grimes, despite long-festering acrimony between the state’s leading Democratic clans: the Lundergans and Beshears.

Jerry Lundergan and Steve Beshear battled in state House races in 1975 and 1977. They were on opposites sides of the 1987 governor’s race — Lundergan ran the campaign of a man who defeated Beshear in the primary. And Beshear sided with Lundergan’s opponent in a contentious race for the 2004 state party chairmanship.

“It was all politics, nothing personal,” Lundergan said of the long-running rivalry last week.

Ironically, in 2011 the Lundergan-Beshear feud paved the way for Grimes’s ascension in state politics. After the secretary of state, Trey Grayson, resigned his position, Grimes decided to challenge Beshear’s hand-picked successor, Elaine Walker, in the Democratic primary. Grimes won by about 10 percentage points after raising substantially more money than Walker. Lundergan played a major role in that campaign as well, while Beshear actively pushed Walker.

But in this year’s Senate race, Beshear offered his full-fledged support to Grimes during a July rally in Lexington. He, along with former Democratic governors, appeared with Grimes this month when she formally filed her election papers.

If she were to win, it would remove a potential political threat to Beshear’s son, Andy, who is running to become attorney general in next year’s elections; Grimes has been viewed as a potential contender for that job.

“Everywhere you go, you see factions of the Democratic Party that … are speaking to each other for the first time in probably a long time, and in some instances, about Alison,” said Greg Stumbo, the state House speaker and friend of Lundergan’s for three decades.

Unpopular politicians

McConnell acknowledges he has a tough fight on his hands, regardless of Grimes’s inexperience. The minority leader notes that “it’s always helpful to have a ‘D’ by your name” in Kentucky.

“I assume any Democrat in a general election is a credible candidate,” McConnell said. “It’s an advantage to be a Democrat in Kentucky, and she’ll be a Democrat.”

While polls show McConnell is still deeply unpopular in Kentucky, Grimes’s approval rating is also underwater. Just 31 percent of Kentucky voters viewed her favorably, compared to 37 percent who viewed her unfavorably — the rest had yet to form an opinion, according to the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling in a December survey.

Attack ads — primarily aired by outside groups — are already filling Kentucky’s air waves. How they shape perceptions of Grimes — if they do at all — will become clearer in the coming months.

“I haven’t seen very many approval ratings in the country on anybody who is in office all that great, and hers don’t look good, either,” McConnell said. “That sort of gives you the view of how the American people are reacting to politicians in general.”

But McConnell has been an incumbent for nearly 30 years; Grimes became secretary of state two years ago this month. That — and the fact that McConnell’s approval ratings remain low even after his campaign has burned through millions building his operation — has Grimes bullish about her chances.

In the interview, Grimes encouraged a reporter to sample some Kentucky bourbon. But she joked that she had heard a “few cases” of Pappy Van Winkle whiskey had gone missing.

“Mitch McConnell has been not looking so good in the polls, so you may try [looking] over there in his campaign headquarters,” she said.